The present invention pertains to an electrical control system for vehicle accessories.
Vehicles are often provided with a variety of accessories. In mounting these accessories within the vehicle, it is known to provide them in or on the dashboard, in overhead consoles, mounted to a rearview mirror, or even within the rearview mirror housing itself. However, each of these locations may interfere with an operator's vision. When a visual accessory is located in the dashboard, a driver will have to look away from the road to see the display of the accessory. Accessories located on the dashboard or positioned below the rearview mirror may obstruct the driver's field of vision in front of the vehicle. By providing an accessory in a portion of the rearview mirror itself, an operator's vision behind the vehicle may be at least partially obstructed by the accessory.
Modern vehicles are typically manufactured to accommodate a variety of different electronic accessories each with their own separate circuitry. Typically, this occurs since different suppliers exist for the various vehicle accessories. However this results in redundancy of electrical components, and accordingly increases the total cost of providing all of the accessories. One alternative to providing separate circuitry for each accessory is to provide several accessories as part of a single expensive unit, such as an electronic dashboard. A problem with these units is a failure of any portion of the unit may require its replacement or costly repair. This cost of replacement or repair may be significantly increased by the difficulty in accessing these units.
Electrically operated garage door openers are a popular vehicle and home accessory. Their operation typically requires the use of a remote transmitter which is battery powered and which is carried in the homeowner's vehicle for transmitting radio frequency signals which are received by a garage door opener receiver for controlling the garage door opening mechanism attached to the garage door. In the prior art, the garage door transmitters have consisted of an enclosure with a battery which must be periodically replaced. The unit is portable and vehicle owners typically either clip them to the vehicle's visor or in some cases they are removably mounted to the dashboard.
There exists several inconveniences with such prior art units, the first being that with the portable unit it is necessary to move the unit into an optimum position for operation of the garage door which is usually in the windshield area. Thus, if the portable unit is mounted on the dashboard, it must be removed from the dash and directed toward the garage door for operation. If it is mounted on the visor, it can become a safety hazard in the form of a relatively hard projection at the head level in the vehicle. Further, it obstructs motion of the visor which, when moved, sometimes knocks the transmitter from the visor. Thus, such an arrangement interferes with visor use and poses a safety threat.
Another popular vehicle accessory is an electronically adjustable rearview mirror. Typically, these mirrors include a control mechanism for adjusting the amount of light reflected to the driver. These mirrors will accordingly include a glare threshold, which is the amount of light sensed by the mirror which causes it to adjust its reflectivity. Each driver must manually adjust the mirror if they wish to have it set according to there own preference. These prior art mirrors may be inconvenient when several drivers are sharing a vehicle. Each driver will have to adjust the mirror following use of the vehicle by another driver. Furthermore, a driver may not discover the mirror was adjusted by another driver until the glare from the mirror disturbs his vision. Thus the mirror will have to be adjusted while the driver is operating the vehicle and when the glare from the mirror makes it difficult for the driver to see the road.